Polkamarkets, a DeFi-powered prediction market, is introducing an innovative approach to the forecasting markets. The platform uses blockchain technology to open up the market to more people across the globe whilst providing them with alternative means of earning from their prediction of real world events.
Polkamarkets is built on the Polkadot blockchain enabling it to combine the power of DeFi and liquidity incentives to usher in a new era of forecasting. With this new model, Polkamarkets is disrupting the prediction markets by becoming the premiere forecasting tool on the blockchain. By utilising the key components of the Polkadot blockchain, the platform will run in a truly decentralised manner whilst being interoperable with other distributed systems for cross-chain information exchange and trading.
Polkamarkets is focused on succeeding where other decentralised prediction markets have failed. Forecasting depends on scale in that the more participants there are, the more the data and the more effective the platform becomes.They aim to achieve this by incentivising liquidity providers and traders to facilitate & take large positions, while a system for curation and resolution ensures efficient and trustworthy markets.
Going by the data from their just ended strategic sale round, Polkastarter is destined for success. Investors have thrown their weight behind the project raising $625,000 within just two weeks. The star studded list of backers include Moonrock Capital, Morningstar Ventures, NGC Ventures, Astronaut Capital and Spark Capital. Perhaps the most telling signal of Polkastarter’s enormous potential is the +100x oversubscription with over 10,000 parties expressing interest in the excess of $80 million during the strategic sale round.
Prediction markets in a Nutshell
The prediction markets are rapidly growing as more people join in the wave of betting on occurrence of events in the future. This is being fuelled by the growing interest in sports, politics, climate change, globalization, and technological advancement among other factors.
The industry is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth rate (CAGR) of 24.5% between 2020 and 2025, with its market size forecasted to rise from $7.2 billion to $21.5 billion in this period. This presents an attractive proposition for existing players in the prediction markets as well as new entrants.
Source: MarketsandMarkets
The rise of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are expected to boost the need for prediction markets as people and organisations try to arrive at more accurate forecasts. Moreover, the growth in smartphone adoption and penetration of 5G technologies is expected to push the growth of prediction markets further as it will improve accessibility to more people. This will also increase demand for decentralised prediction markets as people shift away from the stringent regulations in the current centralised markets.
Decentralised Prediction Markets
There are various decentralised prediction markets with Augur and Gnosis being the prominent frontrunners. These platforms have managed to break down some barriers in the mainstream prediction markets. They have transformed the closed, censored, rigid and expensive industry into a more open, cheaper, and flexible market through their blockchain-based solutions. Moreover, through the power of blockchain technology, decentralised prediction markets are able to lower the risk for the participants by keeping the bad actors out through network effects, trustless environment and heightened security.
However, for all their transformative effect, the existing decentralised markets have failed to take the industry to new levels, largely due to their inherent limitations. For instance, they offer delayed pay-outs, with resolution sometimes taking place days or even weeks after the occurrence of an event. This can be quite inconveniencing for the participants as their capital gets locked up forcing them to miss out on other opportunities.
Additionally, existing decentralised prediction markets suffer from key problems such as lack of liquidity & markets, lack of traders, and duplicate or confusing markets. This has subsequently led to low active daily users and volumes of less than $1 million per day in 2020.
Polkamarkets Value Proposition
Polkamarkets aims to remedy these issues with its DeFi-powered prediction market. They also seek to go a step further by providing an open platform where traders can leverage their knowledge of the past, present and future to forecast specific, real world outcomes.
Polkamarkets will also enable participants to find yield through decentralised exchange, lending, farming and providing liquidity for others to use. Currently, no decentralised platform provides all of this together. The combination of all these services will truly transform the prediction markets with Polkamarkets leading the charge for a DeFi-powered industry.
Polkamarkets value proposition is aptly captured by its following salient features:
Open & Liquid Market - Liquidity Providers are incentivised to provide liquid markets and earn trading fees and yield farming rewards
DeFi Powered Rewards Model - Users and LPs can mine $POLK tokens by making forecasts and providing liquidity. NFTs give exclusive access to special features
Entertainment Value - Polkamarkets will have live streaming for in-play markets in Esports & Sports, daily crypto markets with live price feeds, and virtual events in online communities
User Based Fee Economy - All platform fees on Polkamarkets go directly to the users and liquidity providers
Governance Tools - $POLK token is required to create prediction markets on Polkamarkets, as one of its key use cases.
Curated Event List - Prediction markets will be curated by $POLK holders to ensure safe and open markets
Polkamarkets is a holistic prediction platform that enables users to monetise their forecasts of future outcomes and events by trading in an open market. Users can buy and sell fractions of event outcomes, or even create their own events where others can take their own positions.
Additionally, there are multiple earning opportunities and a host of entertainment features that makes it stand out from the other decentralised prediction markets.
Fair to say, Polkamarkets is the future of forecasting!